Oh absolutely I am, its shameless. 'Selected' candidates for all-in-one courses with 6 or 7 exam fails or several flight test fails being put forward to airline schemes. Bad joss on the airline if they accept them without question.
[edited to add] Sorry, I didn't answer the rest of your question. The answer is that Flight School A get a contract from airline B for, say 20, MPL candidates. Big advertising campaign follows, 2000 hopefuls apply and absolutely the best 20 candidates are selected, they are so good that even my mum would be able to tell they would succeed. Of the remainder Flight School A has capacity for, say 200 integrated candidates and 100 modular. The candidates that failed the MPL selection are then told, sorry, you failed that, but very high standards etc., how would you like a white tail integrated course? Or even a modular course? No promises but we'll put you in the hold pool and we have very good relations with airlines, between you and me we should have you flying for airline B within 2 years.
The next bit depends on the recruiting market. If the airlines are desperate everyone gets a job, gin and tonics all round. In bad times lots of hopefuls go to the holding pool. Airline C later discovers that it hasn't planned its recruitment very well, phones up the flight school asking, can you let us have 30 pilots? Why yes, of course, but not any 30, we will choose the best we have. As a result in bad times the bottom of the holding pool fills up with detritus. Flight School A realises this is not good, they can't have people actually knowing they have 300 people in a holding pool that is growing year by year, but how to get rid of them? Answer, institute a policy that says if you fail two (or three) airline interviews you get binned. It then follows that the smart thing for Flight school A to do is to send 100 pilots for interview to airline C, some good, some bad, not just 30 good ones. The airline takes the good ones and it's one strike for the remaining 70 who were submitted for interview, and so the wheel turns. Of course no-one who still wants a flying career is going to boast that they got chucked out of a holding pool, so this operation is kept fairly quiet because neither the flight school nor the binned candidates benefit from people knowing this goes on.
As to the contract you mention, the contractor, who we will call flight school D, emptied the bottom of its holding pool in the direction of the poor airline, and gossip has it that they were even phoning up hopefuls who had been thrown out of the holding pool two years before in an effort to fill slots. I doubt that really helps the airline.
Some airlines use recruitment contractors who are motivated to provide their own students rather than others, some airlines use recruiting contractors who do not have an ATPL training company attached, and are therefore more independent, some do the recruitment themselves (with varying thoroughness). Ryanair do their own very thorough selection which includes a full day of competency based tests and a sim ride. They recruit continuously, and plan their recruitment. To be fair, they claim a 50% fail rate, airline C in the above scenario would have had a 70% fail rate! I think the answer must be that the Ryanair figure is a continuous average for the biggest airline in Europe over several years, and therefore possibly represents more reliable data than a 'single event' recruitment for a smaller one. Note that Ryanair do not say they take 50% of the applicants, they say that 50% who get to selection are unemployable by their standards. It may be that they do not take all the remaining 50%, it would seem unlikely. They probably reject candidates who are employable but not in the top percentiles, but I am guessing.
Last edited by Alex Whittingham; 19th May 2017 at 15:54.